Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

Frank Galati and I spoke to one another on New Year’s Day to exchange good wishes. We recollected having been at Frank’s house at the turn of the millennium (the last time I was awake at midnight on New Year’s Eve). Frank and Peter had televisions in every room and a news service tracked the moment of midnight across the world, spanning time zones. It kept being midnight somewhere and the world was united in a rolling celebration of a new millennium.

It’s amazing to me a decade has passed since that evening - it feels like a brief moment ago. But when I think of all that has happened since - in the world and at Steppenwolf - I am amazed again. As a nation, we had yet to experience the events of September the 11th, 2001 and all of the changes that event precipitated. We were in rehearsal for Mother Courage and the prospect of the 30 years’ war of the play took on a new meaning. When, a year later, we were in rehearsal for The Time of Your Life on September the 11th, Saroyan’s plea, “In the time of your life, live!” gained new urgency.

The communication platforms that have evolved in these past 10 years - the ubiquity of the web, of Facebook and the twitterati, et. al - have made the world seem, indeed, like a global village. We are negotiating the strange dynamic of all of this accessibility with all of the alienation that it can, paradoxically, produce. Our narratives of self are given new outlets, all of which have their own conventions of expressiveness. We curate ourselves going out and we curate the world coming in. We no longer wait for a newspaper to tell us the news, we collate our news sources and create the portal through which we receive the world. And fast, everything is instant.

At Steppenwolf, we keep making our plays. By the measure of so much around us, making plays is a slow-cook process. There’s no way to speed it up and no way that we’d want to. In fact, what we’ve done over the past decade is, I realize, attempt to slow it down. All of the efforts we have made over the past decade have been dedicated to making the experience of Steppenwolf a deep dive: an engagement in the public square to reflect, discuss, interpret. Yes, we have used the available technologies to provide access to our theater and our artists (our website is rife with blog entries, podcasts, information about our history and artists), but it is an access in the service of preparation and interpretation. It is access to an extension of the time one spends in the theater; it provides a space for a lingering, a savoring, a deeper engagement with our work and our artists.

As we begin this decade, we have contemplated the themes we feel these times evoke. We recognize that our privilege as theater artists is to provide those themes a space and time for contemplation. We look at our season of work as a long-form conversation; an arc of thought and experience.

Looking to our 2010-2011 season, we find ourselves preoccupied with the question of the public/private self and the communities in which we circulate. One of the most striking consequences of the communication technologies that are now ubiquitous is this issue of the curated experience: we curate the news and entertainment that comes out and we curate the self on Facebook, the self that lives through Twitter, the self that’s LinkedIn. Each has its own language, its own permissions and restraints and the worlds we take in are similarly tailored: we can choose the political valence of our news sources, we can select entertainment sources that reflect our tastes. We negotiate our virtual selves with much greater agency than our flesh and blood selves. We create or participate in virtual communities of like-minded people. What does all of this choice do to our private self? To our public self? And what happens to community? If the community of our choosing lives in virtual space, where do we live in relation to the community where we live?

These are some of the questions that we are engaging in our 2010-11 season. We have chosen five plays that each, in their different ways, approach the question of the public/private self in community.

Can you imagine where we’ll be in a decade? It’s just a blink of an eye away and yet, the world may have revised itself (again).

This entry was posted by Martha Lavey on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 3:24 pm and is filed under 2010-2011 Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.